‘Universal Language’ Director Matthew Rankin On His Surreal Dark Horse Bid For Best International Feature Film: “People Feel It”

deadline.com:

Matthew Rankin’s second feature is something of an anomaly on this year’s Oscar shortlist for International Feature Film. For one thing, it takes place in a world that doesn’t actually exist, positing a surreal fusion of east and west that transplants the earnest rustic dramas of the Middle East to the bland, snow-covered industrial estates of Winnipeg, Canada.

The plot is even harder to describe, involving a spectacle-snatching turkey, a desperately dull tour guide, and an office worker who quits his job to visit his mother, all linked by the story of two young children who find a bank note buried, tantalizingly, in the ice.

It shouldn’t work but it does, as proven when the film won Rankin an Audience Award after premiering in Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes last year.

Here, he gives some vital backstory that helps to make (more) sense of one of the strangest films of the year… DEADLINE: This is not the usual kind of film that would make the Oscar shortlist.